It would soon turn out that the fire-burned tunnel that Fili and Kili had entered was not as long or as narrow as the dwarves feared it would be. The whole road, from end to end – or at least, as far along as they would go – was only three miles and to travelers carrying less grief and better supplies, it would have been no trouble at all to traverse the span in an hour or two.

The brothers, however, had far more grief than they could carry and fewer supplies than they wished to lay their hopes upon. Though the road was cut straight and became eventually rather wide, and though there were no side-paths or crossroads, seemingly, there was little chance for the dwarves to celebrate their safety. They rarely thought with pleasure on the lack of dark doorways gaping wide, of winding ways or shadowy enclaves fraught with the promise of hidden enemies waiting to ambush them. They were too lost in their own thoughts, too busy battling their grief to think of their luck just yet.

The entrance to the tunnel from the river-room was as narrow as the other three doorways had been, and carved with doorpost and lintel the same, marked with a rune as has already been stated, and for nearly a mile after they entered the tunnel, their path ran on in the same narrow way. When there had been three members of Fili's company, they had walked only a few yards up the passage to the mark cut into the floor; now, the brothers passed the carving and did not stop to look. They gave the mark no thought at all, too lost in their grief, and Kili would have been surprised to hear that he and his brother had walked for less than an hour, covering less than a mile of ground, before he called their first halt and stopped to cook their meat. Any orc that had discovered them would have had easy pickings of the two distracted and disorient dwarves who did not know their own good fortune, for there were no orcs to find them.

After a brief rest, after the meat was cooked and the baggage repacked, Kili put out the fire; he managed to salvage the burnt ends of three thick logs that he hoped were still whole enough to give them one last tiny fire before they collapsed into ash. He convinced his brother to spare one of the torch sticks that they might have a bit of cheerful light as they went on. For all that Fili's last words had been confident and spoke of a grand return home, Kili was still worried for his brother. Fili's eyes were still too empty and reflected the fire like a hollow glass.

While they had a light, there was no need for the dwarves to walk with their hands touching the walls, and they saw before they reached it the end of the narrow hallway and the way that their path entered suddenly into a wide, round room and ran on along what could only be called a road.

Fili walked through the doorway almost without seeing it, so intent was he on his own thoughts, and Kili had to touch his arm to drawn him out and stop him long enough to have a look around.

Beyond the narrow hall, the room was at least fifteen feet across and the walls were smooth and round, though rather crudely marked. Straight on, the road ran forward almost twice as wide as the hall that they had left. It traveled north and west along the same line that they had been walking, but there was a slight angle to the floor, sloping upwards. Looking back, Kili saw that this side of the doorway had been blasted by the ancient fire more directly than the door down below. The cut stones here were cracked and blistered by the heat that must have come racing down the road and struck against it with a crushing force. Ripples of melted stone circled outwards from the broken door and the whole wall looked for all the world like a square of hard wax that had been blasted by a welding torch and allowed to dry in running rivulets. It was a well-cut wall that could withstand that blast without crumbling, and Kili admired the hand that had made it.

Fili stood back and looked around the room, not really seeing any of it, but Kili crouched down and picked up a bit of broken stone that seemed to have fallen from the doorframe. He turned it over in his hands thoughtfully.

"Fili, look here," he called to his brother. "This side was protected from the worst of the fire. It is carved like the posts down below, and this…" He showed his brother the underside of the stone. The carvings were worn but easy to see and only faintly licked by the blackening flames. On one corner, a thick barrel had been cut from the rock. It was cracked, but there were signs that a hole had been born through it.

"A hinge," Fili said. He scuffed the floor with his boot, kicking up a little dust and some soot. "There was a wooden door here, I suppose," he added, but there was little curiosity in his voice. "The heat that melted this stone would have been hot enough to turn wood to ash in seconds. Time has rotted all the rest…" He turned away.

Kili sighed and set down the bit of rubble. He stood up. "Another clue to our mystery," he said, hoping to catch his brother's interest.

Around the floor of the room were two shallow grooves that came down from the western road, circled the perimeter, and then returned up the road again forming the knotted tear-drop shape. If it had been decorative, the marks would have been disappointing and primitive, but Kili did not think that that was its purpose.

"A turn-about?" he guessed. "They must have drawn pony-carts down this road. They turned around here and went up again along the same path, but ponies aren't bred underground." He looked hopefully up the road beyond the reach of their light. "There must be a way out!"

"Maybe," Fili said, not ready to hope just yet. "There is no movement in the air, no cold breeze and the scent is stale. If there is a way out up there, then the door is closed or blocked up by stone." He saw the disappointment on his brother's face and forced himself to give a reassuring smile. "We shall have a look, in any case," he said. "Who knows what we may find."

Leaving the round room, the brothers were able to walk comfortably side-by-side up the road. Kili was glad to have something to occupy his thoughts while the torch-flame burned. He examined the wheel-ruts in the floor – for that was what he took them to be – and tried to guess at the manner of cart that had made them, whether it was a single, two-wheeled cart or two smaller wheelbarrows drawn by hand. The stone was too hard to have hoof prints from the ponies that would have decided the point for him. Ponies seldom pulled wheelbarrows, but whether the road would have been wide enough for two pony carts to pass each other by, he could not be sure. It seemed unlikely that the people here would have led only a single cart down all the way to the turn-about and back up again, waiting each time for the next to go by.

One thought led to the next, and Kili began looking hard at the walls. Where had the carts been led down to? Where had they come from? They had not, as yet, found any open doors or cross roads through which supplies might have been carried. The walls on either side so far ran smooth, and the wheel ruts were even with no sign that they had stopped more often in one place than another. It seemed strange to a dwarf who had been raised among the bustling forges of Ered Luin that the people here would have led their carts down one at a time to the very bottom of the road only to load or unload them and carry their burdens piecemeal through a long, narrow hall (which must also have been walked in single-file) into the river-room.

Still musing on this and other things, Kili was disappointed when the torch flame finally guttered and went out, sending the road and his thoughts into darkness once more. The air in the passage was too old to give them a stronger flame and the wood of the torch itself has still many inches that might have burned in cleaner air. Kili stuck the torch-end into his belt and, sniffing the air, thought to himself how Betta would have been gasping for breath and nearly suffocated in this place.

The thought brought back his sorrow, but he reminded himself that it was good that Betta would not suffer, and at least there was no sour smell of poison in this air. There was no breeze, as Fili had pointed out, and if vents had ever been cut through the hill to this place, they had long ago been blocked up or closed off by the damage of the conflagration.

With the return of night to their little world, the brothers' grief rose up again. They marched on as before, with one hand each trailing along the wall to feel for open doors, but there were none and they did not expect to find any. Fili was first in line and set their pace. While the torch had burned, they had made tolerable progress, but now Fili's feet walked slower and he took out from under his arm one of the bent, iron rods that they had used to brace up their firewood upon their backs when they had had more of it. He held out the rod before him, feeling along the ground the way that a blind man would feel with his cane, and he hoped in this way that they might avoid accidentally walking over a cliff or tumbling down any sudden steep stairwell that might appear before them in the dark.

At first, the sharp, ringing rap of iron against cold stone gave both brothers a great deal of anxiety. They stopped several times and tried several different ways of tying a cloth over the end of the rod to muffle the sound, but in the silence of the tunnels even the ragged breathing of two exhausted dwarves echoed loudly in their ears. Eventually, they gave up trying and admitted that the tap of a cane was nothing when their breath was so loud that even a half-deaf orc could have found them and shot them in the dark before they knew anything about it.

Not that there was any reason to worry; the brothers knew by touch that there were no caves on this road for an orc to hide in, and no cross paths for him to creep out of. The tapping of Fili's cane echoed against roof and wall and told the dwarves all they needed to know of the shape of the tunnel ahead. Their ears were not as reliable as a bat's would have been in a cave, but the more time that they spent in darkness, the sharper their hearing became. They heard no noise but what they made themselves, and there was no sign of any life but their own.

It did not take long before Kili was thinking to himself that, even if he and his brother did come across some strange, dark-dwelling creature (not of the orc-kind), that he would welcome the company as a change to their own. He and his brother knew each other too well to say much, and their thoughts dwelt upon the same two troubles: the loss of Betta and their own pitiful struggles to find a way out of the mountain. Neither topic made for good conversation and to speak such things aloud would be to say what everyone already knew and to make real those things which they only feared.

Indeed, it went without saying that the brothers must go on, with or without hope; only, it had been easier to do when their guide had been with them, urging them on with her unwavering certainty. It was more natural for Fili and Kili to speak hopefully when Betta was with them. Alone, they were too used to each other's company, each brother too familiar with the other's thoughts and moods. When Betta was with them, there had been much to say, stories to tell and arguments to make, words both sharp and kind, and jokes at each other's expense. Without her, such things seemed a waste of breath.

And yet, even as they carried their grief on their backs, it was an easy thing to forget, in the dark, in despair, that Betta was gone. She had been with them so long, and more than once, Fili would find himself straining to hear her soft footsteps behind him, remembering only too late that he had lost her. Kili, too, would sometimes wake suddenly from his dark musings and, imagining that she had fallen behind, he would stop and turn back to wait for her only then to recall that no length of time would ever be long enough for her to catch up with them.

Kili clung to his optimism, and Fili repeated to himself that he would get his brother home, but the longer they went on, the thicker the air grew. If they were walking toward an open door, then they should have felt the change by now.

In truth, Fili thought more often of Betta than Kili did. Though Kili had seen her face and heard her last words before she fell, both haunted him, and he strove to keep his mind busy and away from such thoughts. His guilt cut as deep as a double-edged blade; he had failed to save Betta, and so he was also to blame for Fili's suffering.

Kili knew well his brother's grief. He listened carefully to the bootsteps ahead of him and heard how often Fili stumbled or stopped. Whether Fili noticed his own faltering feet or not, Kili could not say for certain, but whenever his brother's steps ceased to move forward, he would reach out and put his hand on Fili's shoulder, urging with a gentle pressure for his brother to go on.

They walked slow and made poor time. Three miles may well have been thirty for two brothers who were bruised in both body and spirit. Eventually, a second hour passed and left them two miles from the river-room. Kili heard Fili's footsteps stop yet again, but by the time his hand found his shoulder, he could only brace his brother's weight as Fili sank to his knees, exhausted.

Of course he was tired, Kili chided himself. The hour was late and they had labored since the early morning. It had been days since they had had a proper night's sleep and far longer since they had slept in a proper bed. The strength of Dwarves was as enduring as the stone under their feet, yet even they needed sleep and time in which to heal their wounds. The strongest stone would still break if you ground it down long enough.

"We should rest," Kili said. "I know that I have had no sleep since last night, and you did not close your eyes at the last camp either."

"I cannot sleep," Fili said, rising to his feet again. "Even as we walked here, if ever I closed my eyes to rest their weariness, I find myself falling into terrible dreams. I fear that when next I sleep, it will be to wake no more. I will be trapped alone, or forever in the dark waters with her… No! We must keep going."

He tried to walk on, but his legs were weak and Kili held tight to his arm, refusing to let go. "You are overtired," he insisted. "Your mind is playing tricks on you. And you are not alone, brother. If you fall asleep, rest assured that I will wake you when it is time to go on. Does your arm still give you pain? I was not thinking. You should have walked on the left-hand side; you should not have used it."

"I do not know whether it hurts," Fili said. "I can feel nothing beyond the pain in my heart."

Kili sighed and was sympathetic, if a little impatient with his brother. There would be time for grief when they were free of the mountain, and he did not like to hear Fili speak so despairingly while they were yet trapped. But Kili was not Thorin; he knew his brother's moods but not how to shake him from this dark depression. He had not been there to hear what his uncle said to his brother in the room where their mother lay dead, but Fili had come from Dis' sickbed stronger and more determined than ever, and he had nursed Kili thought his much longer grief.

It was Kili's turn now to nurse his older brother.

"Sit down," he said, leading Fili to the wall and helping him to sit against it. "I will light another torch. We must not always be walking in darkness, and perhaps a little light will show us some new hope or tunnel that I have not seen. If you have been sleepwalking, then we may have missed…"

His words trailed off suddenly and his hand tightened on Fili's shoulder. He had sat his brother down, but when Kili had leaned himself against the wall to sit beside him, the stone had seemed to shift under his hand. It was not much, and nothing that any but a Dwarf would have felt, but he drew back with a start and pulled his surprised brother with him.

"What…?"

"Fili, stand up!" Kili hauled his brother to his feet and they stood staring into the darkness.

"What is it? What do you see?"

"I cannot see anything in this damned dark," Kili muttered. "I felt the stone give way under my hand. These tunnels may not be as safe as we thought."

"Light the torch," Fili said, sounding more awake in that moment than he had since they had left the river-room.

Kili could not say why he hesitated then. He had been eager enough to light a fire before. If it were indeed only a weakness of the wall that he had felt, their small torch could not cause any more damage to the stone, and it would show them their danger. Still, he could not help but feel anxious as he reached for the flint in his pocket. It occurred to him suddenly that there may be other things sleeping in the dark, waiting to be woken up by their light.

He took one of the sticks from his bundle and set it on the ground, then took out his knife and flint. He had had a great deal of practice in lighting campfires and torches from scratch these past few days, but his hands were aching from the cold air of the tunnels and from holding tight to his sword. It took longer than he liked to admit for the wood to catch the sparks he made and, not for the first time, Kili wished for a lantern and some good lamp oil instead.

While his brother struggled to light their torch, Fili took off his gloves and reached out with his hands, feeling the length of the cold wall for weaknesses. He felt the same slight give that Kili had found, but decided that it was not loose stone, exactly. There was a different texture to the rock itself and in one place only which meant, he guessed, that a different type of stone had been used. It was softer and more porous than the rest, as if it had been worked harder than the simple polishing that the wall had been given.

Though the tunnel was already as black as pitch, Fili closed his eyes as he searched with his fingers until he found the boarder where here it was soft and there it was hard. No, there was no weakness here. It was a thing carefully shaped and set: a door.

Hidden doors were common enough in Dwarf Mountains; though in Ered Luin, they were more often built to show the stone-cutter's skill, not as a defense or for the hiding of secrets, and Thorin's folk had little use for that sort of protection in a land of few enemies and no orcs or trolls.

Under his bare hands, Fili found that this part of the wall was almost as smooth as glass, smoother even than the stone had been down below. There were only a few faint ripples from the old fire, and he guessed that the wall here had been polished by hand, not by heat. With his glove on, he would not have been able to discover this door – they had been feeling for open passages and caves, after all, not invisible, closed doors – and he wondered how many other such clues he and his brother had missed along the way.

Kili's sparks finally caught the wood and kindled into a weak flame. At the same moment, Fili's fingertips found the thin seam of the door. It was no wider than a single strand of hair stretched tight, and he had to pass his hand over it several times before he was convinced that it was not a fracture in the stone's surface. In the flickering firelight of the torch, only the keenest Dwarf sight could have seen the outline of the door, and it took Kili some searching to find it with his own eyes even after his brother showed him where it was. The door was carefully crafted, but Fili guessed that it had not originally been made to be invisible. The fire had done that more than any Dwarven skill.

"How many of these do you think we've passed along the way?" Kili asked, shaking his head.

"I wonder that myself," Fili answered. He looked up and down the length of the wall. If there were any other doors, he could not see them. There was no sign of keyhole or doorknob, and no clue as to how they might open this door from this side.

"At least we know that it has not been recently used. It would take a welding torch to cut through this melted stone. The fire must have sealed shut any doors that were here."

Kili looked up at the high walls and arching ceiling, and down at the wheel ruts in the floor. "I begin to wonder more and more when this great fire was. What could make so high a heat that it melts stone for miles? And who lived here? The chambers we have found are Dwarf-work, to be sure, but I have never heard of any permanent settlements in the Mountains of Angmar. What sort of Dwarves would allow this much damage to be done to their main road? It seems almost that they gave up this place and turned it into a giant steam pipe."

Fili shook his head. "I cannot guess why or how they would do it. Unless the whole mountain had been turned to a giant forge… I would almost say that this tunnel is like an ancient lava tube, but there is no sign that molten rock or metal ever flowed through it and the stone is cut very carefully…"

He shook his head. "I do not understand it, but it is a mystery that we will not solve today. This door cannot be opened. Farther on, we may find one that can, but we must carry a light if we are to see it. Even with a light, I do not know that we would have found this door if you had not leaned your clumsy shoulder against it."

Fili smiled at his brother. There was still sadness in his eyes, but it gave Kili hope that Fili was once more able to make bad jokes. "One thing that this adventure has not improved," he said, "is your sense of humor, brother. But you will not distract me with riddles in the dark. We both need our rest, and you must sleep and eat. You are still wounded.

Fili sighed. The curiosity of the invisible door had driven away his grief for a few moments, but Kili's words brought back his fear. "I will rest," he agreed, "but I will not sleep."

Kili said nothing to that. The two brothers sat down against the wall, and they were careful to lean their backs against solid stone and to face the one door that they knew was there. Unhappily, Kili put out the torch yet again. He would rather have slept with the light on, but they did not have wood to waste in burning while their eyes were closed. He knew that they would want a light when they moved again; there could be no more walking in darkness.

Well, here we are again. We really do need to stop meeting like this, people will talk.

It seems our favorite dwarves are in a tight spot yet again. Very high-maintenance, aren't they. But if you've got any suggestions for a heart-felt, near-death conversation between the two brothers, best speak up now. Next chapter will be sappy and then we're on to new adventures and new dangers and, perhaps, a new friend, too.

Agent Five: Stop! You make me blush :) How dare you not allow private messaging so that I can gush over how wonderful you are to say such things.

Obsessively yours,

-Paint